Week 7 Prompt Response (Book Controversies)

Alexia Underwood’s 2018 article, The #MeToo movement hit the literary world hard this week. It’s not the first time made the point that public discourse after accusations of sexual harassment come to light, “tends to revolve around the accused and what’s at stake for them”; a tendency that continues to center men as the protagonists in every story (25th para.). 

The debate that stems from the reveal of powerful men with a past of abusive, misogynistic, homophobic, and/or racist actions is too often dominated by the question: will we continue to read him, publish him, hear him on the radio, screen his films? When the more meaningful questions are, how are men like Junot Diaz or Sherman Alexie or James Dasher or Jay Asher still being lifted into positions of influence and power? How are these men able to succeed while consistently threatening, silencing, and belittling numerous individuals because of their gender? Why are they allowed to keep those positions of power (the Pulitzer Prize board announced that Diaz would not be removed from the board) after they prove themselves unfit? It’s not for any lack of other outstanding authors representing the Latinx experience, this we know for certain. 

Literature is a creative industry and one historically tied to debates about censorship, so it’s no wonder that questions of how separate an artist is, or should be, from their work continue to interest many people. 

Writing about his relationship to the problematic John Wayne, Tyler Malone (2019) observed: 

The idea that one can or should separate the art from the artist pretends that art exists in a vacuum, that what is on the page or screen has nothing to do with the hand that put it there, that the artist’s desires and dreams as well as their prejudices and complexities don’t seep into every word and image. On the other hand, the argument that we should judge a work by the sins of its creator reeks of puritanical righteousness and moral certitude. No work of art exists that wasn’t created by some complicated creature.

This endless debate is convenient for keeping the heat off the corporate culture and politics responsible for the actual subjugation of women in society. Falling in love with a book or movie is an individual experience and how one responds to hearing their favorite author is a creep of the worst kind I suspect also depends on the individual. 

An industry that avoids meaningful discussion about how its operations allow misogyny is, however, more important to examine and debate critically. 

Laurie Penny (2017) wrote in response to the “revelations” about “endemic male sexual aggression” in Hollywood, the media and beyond: 

It turns out that this isn’t about individual monsters. It never was. This is about structural violence, about a culture that decided long ago that women’s agency and dignity were worth sacrificing to protect the reputation of powerful men and the institutions that enabled their entitlement. Everyone, including the “good guys,” knew it was happening.

In a public response to his, admitted, misconduct Diaz is quoted, “We must continue to teach all men about consent and boundaries.” Who exactly is this “we” Diaz refers to!? The ease with which Diaz transitions to “we” conveniently puts him on the same side as the women who, bravely and at great personal cost, spoke out against him. As if Diaz, and the male-dominated publishing world he represents, are somehow leaders in a continuing educational program for cultural reform. 

I have never read Junot Diaz and I probably never will. I feel completely fine about that. If my mother or my best friend or a complete stranger reads everything he’s ever written I’m fine with that too. I’m not fine, however, that he continued to serve on the Pulitzer board. If I went to MIT, I would most definitely not take his courses and I question that university’s decision to keep him in a position with access to and authority over young women without so much as an ongoing plan to facilitate and oversee that Diaz is actually taught “about consent and boundaries.”